1. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to an apparatus and method for measuring the quality of audio and, more particularly, to an apparatus and method for measuring the quality of audio using fingerprints and arousal and valence (AV) information.
2. Description of the Related Art
Audio is sound that is output, for example, from a radio receiver or a television set. The measurement of the quality of such audio is essential for compressing the audio, mitigating the noise of a signal corresponding to the audio, or measuring the imperceptibility of audio watermarking.
In general, methods of evaluating the quality of audio may be divided into subjective evaluation methods and objective evaluation methods. The subjective evaluation methods have the disadvantage of being affected by the emotional state of a human who participates in the measurement of the quality of audio, an environmental factor and the like, and the disadvantage of requiring a long period of time and much effort.
Currently, for the above reasons, research into objective methods of evaluating the quality of audio has been conducted.
International Telecommunication Union-R (ITU-R) corresponding to a communication protocol for the radio frequency band publishes 1387, which is a recommendation for a method of evaluating the quality of an audio codec, which is known as Perceptual Evacuation of Audio Quality (PEAQ). However, this objective method of evaluating the quality of audio lacks consideration of the variation of audio over time and a multi-channel, and thus various alternatives have been proposed.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,990,453 discloses a technology that identifies an audio sample using a fingerprint representative of the feature of a specific location of a media file affixed with a database index.
Furthermore, Korean Patent Application Publication No. 2012-0021174 discloses a technology that searches music using an emotion model that is generated based on the similarity between emotion types.
However, the above conventional methods of evaluating the quality of audio have the disadvantage of always requiring original audio as an input. Therefore, when a large-scale test is conducted or there is no reference audio or no audio information, it is difficult to measure the quality of audio.
As a result, there is a need for a method of evaluating the quality of audio using Arousal and Valence (AV) values that are acquired from audio fingerprints and an emotion model that is used for audio search.